The Question of Mark Judge

Because of travel that was arranged several weeks ago, I have not watched the hearings and am catching up on them, mainly through Twitter. The gist of what I’m reading is that the politics are looking worse for Judge Kavanaugh even though the evidence isn’t.

One question on which I’ve gone back and forth is whether the committee ought to have subpoenaed Mark Judge to testify. The case against, as far as I can tell, is that we wouldn’t learn much. He’s already denied Professor Blasey Ford’s story on penalty of perjury, and he would probably take the Fifth if called — which would be used to make Kavanaugh look guiltier even though it would not really strengthen the case against him.

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But maybe he should have been called anyway, just to deprive Kavanaugh’s opponents of the talking point that Republicans are hiding something.

Ramesh Ponnuru
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Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor for National Review, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.
@rameshponnuru

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